The Path to God's Promise

By Ahuva Batya Scharff

One of the last things Elinor Simentov wants is to be a prophet of God, but God has other plans.

A Jewish woman of no particular renown, Elinor is told by God to give a warning to all who will listen. Will she serve as a prophet, sacrificing her goals for herself, self-image, and reputation in order to do something that may be completely useless?

God’s message is simple. Humankind must radically change course or face extinction. To give warning, God uses prophecy to urge humans to change. Transported through past, present, and horrific potential futures, Elinor is asked to share her visionary experiences and conversations with God to urge us to take action.

As we are barraged month after month by once-in-a-lifetime storms, record-setting heat waves, shifting polar vortexes, horrendous floods, and decades long droughts, it’s hard to continue to ignore the signs and omens. The Path to God’s Promise combines dire warnings about climate change with the transformative power of prophetic experience. It asks whether or not it is too late for us to save ourselves and challenges us to live vastly different lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781035820993

Ahuva Batya Scharff

Ahuva Batya (Constance) Scharff, PhD is an internationally recognized speaker and award-winning author. She speaks and writes on the topics of addiction and trauma recovery, the psychological impacts of climate change, women’s leadership, and decolonizing mental health. She is the founder of the Institute for Complementary and Indigenous Mental Health Research and a passionate advocate for access to mental healthcare and radical social transformation to lessen the impacts of climate change. Her nonfiction books center around using complementary mental health practices to improve treatment outcomes. Her poetry and fiction highlight spiritual experience and connection to the divine. The Path to God’s Promise is her first novel.

Book preview

Chapter One

עורי עורי דבורה עורי עורי דברי־שיר

Awake! Awake, Devorah! Awake, awake and sing!

– Judges 5:12

Be careful what you wish for. As a child, I wished only to be near God. If I’d understood the consequences of wishing, of prayer, I probably would have wished for something else. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

My earliest memory is of God speaking to me. I was four. I climbed the thick-branched tree outside our old farmhouse in California’s San Joaquin Valley to lie on one of the limbs. It was early summer. The light breeze made the hair on my arms stand up. I smiled at the way the sun came speckled through the canopy, dappling my skin. While I was delighting in the experience of sun and wind, I heard God’s whispered voice. God said, You belong to Me.

My mother, more superstitious than religious, named me for greatness: Elinor Shefa Simentov. It is the perfect name for a Jewish mystic. Simentov, our family name, means ‘good signs’ in Hebrew—as in signs and omens. Shefa, my middle name, is usually translated as ‘abundance,’ but it can also mean ‘divine emanation’ or ‘flow.’ In Arabic, it means ‘recovery’ or ‘healing.’ Elinor translates from Hebrew as ‘God is my light.’ You could say just from my name that I was fated for a single purpose. But prophecy is a difficult thing for a contemporary Jew. It is not a gift that is accepted in the 21st century, not in my community. And yet I can no longer deny who and what I am.

At first, my visions were simple and comforting. Throughout my childhood, I had a dream about a wall of flowers: blue, deep red, and purple. There was no action, no conversation, just a single picture of a wall covered in a cascade of dark green leaves, vines, and flowers. It cheered me. The vision recurred every year or two until I was nineteen. While on a semester abroad in India, I walked into our classroom at a facility in Pune, turned to my left, and saw through the sliding glass doors that familiar flowered wall. I was shocked. I stared at it for hours on end during our six weeks of classes at the site. Of course, after my stint in Pune, I never dreamed of that wall again. But at the time, seeing the wall encouraged me. It made me feel I was in the right place. More than déjà vu, this was an actual vision that I had recorded in the journals I kept in my youth. It was confirmation to me of my visionary capacity.

Other than a few single images like the one I had of the wall, the visions I have rarely have anything to do with me. I do not have the ability to see lottery numbers. When I try to apply my gift for personal reward, the outcomes are poor. When I know which horse is going to win the Kentucky Derby, I write the winner’s name on a piece of paper—but the instant I put a wager on the animal, I lose. I am accurate when I have nothing to gain, when the visions are a touchstone, reassurance, or warning. I am not a fortune teller. I am a vessel through which visions come. I do not get to choose the channel on the TV.

I look at myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom, contemplating who I am. The mirror is five feet tall in a dark frame and looks more expensive than it was. The room is shadowy. The only light on is on the bedside table far behind me. Though it is dark, I see myself clearly. I am a typical-looking, if heavy, Jewish woman. Three hundred pounds with all the weight in the middle—pendulous breasts and a protruding belly, no butt. I am an apple on thick legs. My stature is a little taller than the average woman, five feet seven, but I seem much taller, not only because of my weight; it’s my presence. I can dominate a room without trying. I’m in a constant battle to ‘pull it back’—a phrase I say to myself so often that it has almost become my mantra. My near-black hair is a tumble of curls that, instead of getting longer, gets tighter. The hair grows. I can tell because I have to dye the grey roots, but the length does not change. It stays just below my chin year after year. Everywhere I travel, especially in the Middle East, I am immediately recognized as a Jew. I look like my people.

In front of the mirror, I sigh. My hands caress the belly that hangs heavy under my cheap t-shirt. I think about losing weight. It might be possible if only I was willing to eat fewer latkes. And chimichangas. I sigh again. The effort to be thinner is daunting.

I lean closer to the mirror to examine my face. There are no lines on my skin or bags under my eyes. I do not look my forty-five years. I attribute my youthful appearance to not having had children. My peers who had children early, before twenty-five, have aged well, but my friends who had children later, especially those who waited until their late thirties or forties, for the most part, have had the life-force sucked out of them. They look shriveled and old. Those who also have to work a full-time job in addition to raising their children have withered on the vine. I gaze at my reflection more closely. The fat helps, too. My facial features are plump and in place. Fat faces crease less than thin ones. Maybe latkes and chimichangas aren’t so bad after all.

Can I really be what God wants? I ask myself silently as I leave my place in front of the mirror to flop down on my bed. Forty-five. Fat. Barren. Not in particularly good health. No boyfriend, husband, or prospects. A spinster. An also-ran who smiles at a bris and sobs later a block down the road, alone in a parked car, because I will never, ever be that beaming mother. Oh sure, I’m flourishing in my career, but that’s the norm in my community. Successful is an adjective applied to almost every Jew I know who works. We’re all a successful doctor, lawyer, professor, artist, scientist, teacher, inventor, nonprofit executive, or entrepreneur. In my community, accolades and awards are as ordinary as taxes. What I am though, is a failure in the way that most counts. I did not fulfil what some argue is the primary mitzvah. I was unable to have a child to carry on our traditions.

I think about God and the task set before me. As I lie with my eyes closed, I recall how two months earlier God approached me about doing something important and constructive with the visions I have.

I was in Pacific Palisades, a beach suburb on the Westside of Los Angeles. It’s an affluent neighborhood with multimillion-dollar homes perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Pali, as it is sometimes called locally, is nestled between Santa Monica and Malibu. Having lived in Los Angeles for many years and gotten sober there, I often return to the area to celebrate important recovery anniversaries with my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. This year, I reached twenty years clean and flew to Los Angeles to get my twenty-year medallion at a big Monday night meeting in Pali.

It wasn’t my regular meeting, the home group I attended faithfully every week for more than ten years. That meeting, on a Friday, I could not make. Not only did I have a writing deadline that prevented me from traveling on Friday, but my sponsor, who has been my sponsor for all of my twenty years sober, now lives in the Palisades. With her three kids, the Pali meeting was more convenient for her than Brentwood, where we usually met when I lived in town.

After the speaker—a Hollywood A-lister more than forty years clean—had finished with his call to recovery, which led to a standing ovation, it was time for the ‘birthdays.’ I was allowed to speak for three minutes about being twenty years clean. My sponsor presented my cake. I thanked her and the A-list actor. Twenty years earlier, he had found a chair for me to sit on in a different crowded room. I was only a few days sober then and too sick to get to the meeting early enough to get a seat. I stood, desperately ill, sweating, and mildly suicidal, beside a garbage can. I was fairly certain that I was going to vomit. He saw me there, ordered someone to get me a chair, and helped hold me up while we waited for the seat to arrive. Then this very famous man looked me in the eye and told me that I was the most important person in the room. He asked me, as if he could read my mind, not to kill myself that day. He didn’t remember his kindness to me, but I did and thanked him. He kissed me in front of everyone as I walked back to my seat.

Two friends, who had come to town for the event, took me out to celebrate at dinner after the meeting. We went to a busy Italian restaurant on the Promenade in Santa Monica. Izzy and Amanda were not alcoholics, but were extremely supportive of my recovery. Neither could believe that a famous movie star had kissed me in front of several hundred people. I laughed. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in meetings, but I didn’t tell them that. I let them enjoy the ‘specialness’ of the occasion. ‘And shouldn’t we do just that?’ I thought to myself, ‘Being sober for twenty years is special.’

I can’t believe it, Izzy said in her thick Australian accent as the waitress refilled my water glass. I could barely hear her over the bustle and loud conversation. I remember when you hid beer in the cattle grate at that summer camp we worked at in Montana, she said. I smiled, recalling her look of utter revulsion when I pulled two cold beers from between the grate’s metal bars and offered her one. I knew then, Izzy continued to Amanda, her wife, that we had a real problem. Anyone who hides beer like that—

I interrupted. I also used to keep whiskey in a shampoo bottle, I said, making sure that the salad on my fork had just the right chicken to vegetables ratio. That’s why I never let you borrow my stuff and I never, ever took a shower unless I was alone. I put the salad into my mouth as my friends looked at me, dumbfounded.

I had no idea, Izzy said.

I am a real alcoholic, I said. And by some miracle, I have not had a drink in twenty years and three days.

My companions held up their water glasses. I did, too. To twenty years of recovery from hopeless alcoholism and a kiss from you-know-who, Amanda said. We clinked our glasses and laughed.

That night I was alone in my room, a garage converted into a guest house that my cousin generously allows me to borrow when I visit. I like staying there. It is quiet with a bed so comfortable that it’s hard to get going in the morning. If I crack the window over the door slightly, the scent of the garden, of the carefully tended roses, wafts in on the breeze that comes inland from the sea.

I sat on the bed in meditation and felt the familiar draw of God calling me. My breathing slowed in a practiced way as I opened my spirit to a consciousness beyond our everyday shared reality. As my breathing reduced to only a few breaths per minute, I loosed my soul from the bindings that keep it anchored in my body, allowing myself to be brought to the place where I most often meet God.

Our spot, as I affectionately think of it, is a fallen tree on a meadow’s edge. The meadow is expansive and seems to be in a state of perpetual spring or early summer. There are wildflowers in the verdant, ankle-high grass. The log is enormous. It’s almost too tall to sit on. The tree trunk is smooth and comfortable, the rough bark long ago stripped away by time and weather. Behind it is a forest, a mix of deciduous trees and evergreens. The scent of the place is intoxicating. It smells intensely of pine with hints of wildflowers.

When I sat down on the log, God was already waiting for me. I want to talk with you about a project that I would like you to complete, God said.

In my visions, God has no form. God presents to me as a kind of heat shimmer that is roughly the size of a man. God has no shape or substance, only an intensity of being and ethereal beauty that are instantly recognizable to me as God. I realize that this appearance is an illusion. It is an access point. God creates it to give me something to hold onto, to communicate with because God’s true manner and nature are incomprehensible. I hear a male voice that speaks English because that is what makes it easiest for us to be in relationship, not because God is male or human or English-speaking. God’s true nature cannot be described in such terms. What I see is not who or what God is. It is a small piece of divinity that is knowable, but only ‘true’ to the extent that a pine needle is descriptive of the tree from which it falls.

I smile. Although I am in awe of God’s power and presence, God is also my closest confidant and friend. This has been the case the whole of my life. As a young child, I would burst into tears whenever the V’ahavta was chanted: You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. I cried because I did love God. I loved Him so much that the mere mention of that love brought tears, and I would throw myself on the synagogue’s floor, proclaiming, I love you, God! I love you!

My childish fits embarrassed my parents, who would pull me from the floor and hurry out of the sanctuary with me still wailing about my love for God. The other congregants at the shul would smile and shake their heads. It wasn’t often that children were removed from services for proclaiming their love for God, though admittedly I was quite loud about it.

While I may no longer have thrown myself on the floor at the shul, my love for God had not changed. I had been receiving visions all my life, and this was how I expressed what that felt like. At least, that’s what I thought before God asked for my devotion to be expressed in action. I was no less sure of my love but far less certain that I could convey my commitment to God in the ways He wanted.

I want you to be My emissary, My prophet. I would like you to speak truth to power and get a message out to as many people as you possibly can. This world needs to hear My voice in a vibrant and meaningful way, God said. God’s presence comforted me. It felt as if He smiled as He spoke. For the most part, with me, God is affable and pleasant. Although I have never asked God about it, I am aware that God chooses this presentation for me, allows me to hear Him in a way that will soothe and calm me. God’s is a strong voice, a voice that makes me feel safe.

No.

God laughed, a deep and throaty sound. I imagined that if God ever took human form for me, He’d look like Dan Haggerty, the actor who played Grizzly Adams on TV in the 1970s, rugged, handsome, and a little bit wild. That was a quick response.

Since when does doing anything You ask lead to good for the one You ask it of? Prophecy is painful for all prophets. I thought about the prophets in the Tanakh. Which of them ever had a good life by doing what God asked of them? Moses, the most revered of our prophets and leaders, had not gotten to enter the Promised Land and had had to put up with decades of people refusing to do what he requested. His experience was the norm for visionaries. People rarely listen to God’s prophets, except Jonah, who was miserable anyway. It’s a lifetime of headache for the seer. Didn’t Jeremiah, the unluckiest of the prophets, suffer directly not just from his visions, but from the first-hand experience of the Babylonians sacking Jerusalem and sending Israel into exile?

In tractate Bava Batra of the Talmud, the rabbis concluded that after the fall of the Second Temple, prophecy is given only to children and madmen. By this time, I was no longer young and at least in my own opinion, not at all mad. I wanted no part of whatever God wanted from me. I didn’t desire to be a seer. If I had to be a visionary or prophet, we could stop at visions of flowered walls.

God said nothing for some time, waiting for me to explain myself. When I did not, He asked, What is your concern?

I did not immediately respond. My head flooded with dozens of reasons why I did not even want to hear God’s request, let alone fulfil it. Finally, I settled on a specific reason, I do not want You to show me events that I am powerless to change.

**********

A year earlier, I sat in tears in the rabbi’s office. A week before that we had both been in Jerusalem, he at an educational seminar, me visiting a friend. Rockets were launched from Gaza, dozens of them. Even in Jerusalem, we were not safe. The missile-alert sirens went off three times, shrilly screaming at us that we had seconds to flee for safety. During the third alarm, I watched the Iron Dome defense system hit one of the incoming rockets. I was leaving an art gallery near the King David Hotel, where I had purchased a painting by Kadishman. They had given me a ‘get it out of the country’ price that I could not pass up.